The wealth gap keeps getting wider

Believe it or not, we’re in an economic recovery. But if you’re not in the upper 7 percent of American households, you may not realize it. If you’re among the rest, i.e., 93 percent of American households, you may still be feeling pinched.

According to a report released April 23 by the Pew Research Center, “wealth inequality widened dramatically during the first two years of the economic recovery, as the upper 7 percent of American households saw their average net worth increase 28 percent while the wealth of the other 93 percent declined,” writes Michael A. Fletcher in the Washington Post. The uneven recovery has only accelerated a decades-long trend of growing wealth inequality in the country, despite rising popular and political awareness of the dynamic.

From 2009 to 2011, the Pew report says, the average net worth of the nation’s 8 million most affluent households jumped from an estimated $2.7 million to $3.2 million. And for the 111 million households that form the bottom 93 percent, average net worth fell 4 percent, from $140,000 to an estimated $134,000, the report said.

These changes mean that between 2009 and 2011, “the wealth gap separating the top 7 percent and everyone else increased from 18-to-1 to 24-to-1” and that “the most affluent 7 percent of households owned 63 percent of the nation’s household wealth in 2011, up from 56 percent in 2009.”

Why such a disparity in net worth? Mostly it’s because the wealthiest households have their assets concentrated in stocks and other financial instruments, while others’ wealth is concentrated in their homes. During the recovery, stock values have rebounded and reached new highs, while housing values have stayed mostly flat.

This widening gap applies to all Americans, but “the last half-decade has proved far worse for black and Hispanic families than for white families, starkly widening the already large gulf in wealth between non-Hispanic white Americans and most minority groups, according to a new study from the Urban Institute,” writes Annie Lowrey in an April 28 article in the New York Times.

The Urban Institute study found that while the wealth gap widened, the income gap between white Americans and nonwhite Americans remained stable, writes Lowrey. “As of 2010, white families, on average, earned about $2 for every $1 that black and Hispanic families earned, a ratio that has remained roughly constant for the last 30 years. But when it comes to wealth—as measured by assets, like cash savings, homes and retirement accounts, minus debts, like mortgages and credit card balances—white families have far outpaced black and Hispanic ones. Before the recession, non-Hispanic white families, on average, were about four times as wealthy as nonwhite families, according to the Urban Institute’s analysis of Federal Reserve data. By 2010, whites were about six times as wealthy.”

By the most recent data, the average white family had about $632,000 in wealth, versus $98,000 for black families and $110,000 for Hispanic families, the report said.

Two major factors helped to widen this wealth gap in recent years. The first is that the housing downturn hit black and Hispanic households harder than it hit white households, in aggregate. Second, black families suffered bigger hits to their retirement savings, the Urban Institute found.

Without changes to government policies, it’s only going to get worse. “The Urban Institute suggests reforming government policies that encourage savings but disproportionately benefit the already wealthy and families with high incomes, like the home mortgage interest deduction,” writes Lowrey.

Such a wealth gap is far from the justice Jesus called us to practice.

An effective model for fighting poverty

I volunteer for a local group called Circles of Hope. Its motto is, "Working to end poverty one family at a time." I've written about this before, but I want to point out some information we received this week from the National Circles Campaign.

Circles USA keeps data on Circle leaders, which, the report explains, "are low-income individuals who have made a commitment to build social capital with middle- and upper-income Allies, attend community meetings and work toward goal attainment for greater economic stability." These Circle leaders report their progress in these areas:
• income
• public assistance
• assets
• debts
• employment
• education
• insurance.
In data collected from July 2008 to December 2012 from 518 people who completed at least a six-month survey, Circle leaders showed improvement in the following areas:
• increased social capital: 69.3%
• has volunteered in community: 71.5%
• has safe housing: 92.3%
• has health insurance: 34.2%
• has reliable transportation: 73.6% 
• has a valid driver's license: 36%
• obtained a car: 34.6%
• paid off credit: 29.9%
• opened a savings account: 38.1%
• enrolled in education:32.1%
• employed: 33%.
 Further data shows the following improvements:
• income after 18 months of involvement: 27% increase
• public benefits after 18 months of involvement: 27% decrease
• assets after 18 months of involvement: 88% increase.
The reports notes that "poverty creates severe financial hardship for communities, states and our nation. According to a report from  the Center for American Progress, our nation spends $500 billin a year on the fallout from children raised in poverty."
 OK, enough numbers, even though these are important. What I've witnessed in my three years of involvement with Circles of Hope is the building of community. Last week, five groups finished their 18-month commitment as a circle, and every one talked about the Circles community being a family.
This past Tuesday, the Allies got together, and the Circle leaders got together. We do this every time there's a fifth Tuesday in a month. We Allies heard that a Circle leader had said that we shouldn't be discouraged if we're not seeing a big improvement in their meeting their goals because the experience of having people around them who care about them is worth more than we'll ever know.
So the numbers above are good, and they're important. But those results are more a byproduct of what Circles is about. At its core, Circles builds community and thereby builds hope. And the community that is built is not just for their good but for the good of us all. The more we work together to end poverty, the better off we all are. 
For more information on those numbers, check out www.circlesusa.org.
And for anyone in the Newton, Kan., area, there is a training for Allies on May 11. To learn more, call 316-284-0000. 

How do digital immigrants deal with young digital natives?

In 2001, education and technology writer Marc Prensky popularized the term digital natives to describe the first generations of children growing up fluent in the language of computers, video games and other technologies. (The rest of us are digital immigrants, struggling to understand.)

In her article “The Touch-Screen Generation” in The Atlantic (April), Hanna Rosin writes about how young children—even toddlers—are spending more and more time with digital technology. She asks, “Should parents recoil or rejoice?”

In 1999, Rosin writes, the American Academy of Pediatrics discouraged television viewing for children younger than 2, “citing research on brain development that showed this age group’s critical need for ‘direct interactions with parents and other significant caregivers.’ ” In 2006, 90 percent of parents said their children younger than 2 consumed some form of electronic media. Yet in its updated policy in 2011, the AAP “largely took the same approach it took in 1999, uniformly discouraging passive media use, on any type of screen, for these kids,” writes Rosin.

What are parents to do? Well, Rosin is one, with three children “who are all fans of the touch screen.” But when she talks with people (also parents of young children) who help develop interactive media for children, she finds them more restrictive than she is about their children using technology.

Rosin describes “the neurosis of our age: as technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what it might be doing to their children.” Parents are afraid that if they don’t use the new technology just right, “their child could end up one of those sad, pale creatures who can’t make eye contact and has an avatar for a girlfriend.”

Rosin asks, How do small children actually experience electronic media, and what does that experience do to their development?

Because much of the recent technology is new, most of the research in this area concerns toddlers’ interaction with television. Researchers eventually identified certain rules that promote engagement: “stories have to be linear and easy to follow, cuts and time lapses have to be used very sparingly, and language has to be pared down and repeated.”

Now researchers are beginning to study toddlers’ use of iPads to see what they can learn and if they can transfer what they learn to the real world. They ask further, “What effect does interactivity have on learning? What role do familiar characters play in children’s learning from iPads?”

Rosin wondered if too many apps developed for children emphasized education over play. Then she came across apps designed by a Swedish game studio named Toca Boca.

In 2011, the studio’s founders, Emil Ovemar and Björn Jeffery, launched Toca Tea Party. “The game is not all that different from a real tea party,” writes Rosin. It’s not overtly educational, and there’s no winning and no reward. “The game is either very boring or terrifically exciting, depending on what you make of it,” she writes. For kids, the game is fun every time, “because it’s dependent entirely on imagination.”

Rosin notes that “every new medium has, within a short time of its introduction, been condemned as a threat to young people.” However, despite “legitimate broader questions about how American children spend their time,” parents have to decide for themselves.

Rosin decided to let her young son have access to an iPad for six months. “After about 10 days, the iPad fell out of his rotation, just like every toy does.” It was just one more tool.

We digital immigrants will continue to struggle with our digital natives.

Writing as confession and witness

What follows are notes for a talk I gave on April 10 at Life Enrichment at Bethel College in North Newton, Kan.

Where do we hear these terms: confession and witness? One place is in police dramas, where the cops or detectives interview suspects and try to get them to confess to a crime, or they talk to witnesses to find out what happened.

Another place we hear these terms is in church, right? Catholics, at least, go to confession, but even Protestants sometimes offer prayers of confession. And Christians are often exhorted to bear witness to their faith.

I want to place these terms in another sphere—writing—which is something I’ve been doing for more than 30 years as a journalist, a reviewer and a sometimes fiction writer.

Let me give you a quick bio: I graduated from Wichita State University in 1976 and moved to Newton to be part of an intentional Christian community (more on that later). In 1978, I began working as editorial assistant for The Mennonite, at that time the magazine of the General Conference Mennonite Church. I worked downtown in Newton at what was then the headquarters of that denomination. Mostly I did copy editing but increasingly did some reporting. In 1984, I became assistant editor and did more writing as well as editing. In 1992, I became editor. Then in 1998, the magazine merged with the magazine of the Mennonite Church to become a new magazine, also called The Mennonite. I became associate editor, as I still am today.

So as a journalist I’ve worked hard at the “witness” part. I’ve gone to meetings and observed what was said, what a group of church leaders decided about something. I’ve tried to be a good observer and witness. I still do this occasionally; in fact, I was just in Kansas City last week to cover meetings of our church’s Executive Board. The goal of a good journalist is to be as objective as possible, to be a good witness.

But the “confession” part comes in because we recognize that none of us is completely objective. We must be attentive to our prejudices, our slant on things and acknowledge these. Confession requires looking inward, observing ourselves, then expressing what we find.

Such confession comes more into play when writing fiction or memoir. In 2011, I published a book called Present Tense: A Mennonite Spirituality, in which I try to address what Mennonite spirituality is. I report on (or witness to) what I’ve observed over the years as a Mennonite and as a Mennonite journalist. I draw on many books I’ve read on spirituality and theology and Scripture. But I also write much about my own experience (confession), so it’s partly a memoir.

[Here I summarized the book.]

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve also been a book reviewer for the Wichita Eagle for more than 20 years. Here, too, my writing has combined witness and confession. Reviewing involves reporting what I’ve observed in reading a book—what it’s about, what it’s trying to achieve and how well the author succeeds. Since most of what I review for the Eagle is fiction, I judge its success on how well it tells its story, how well it connects with human experience, how beautiful its prose is. But when reviewing, as in any writing, I reveal some of my own experience and perspective. This is often subtle and understated—readers want to know about the book, not you, yet every reader brings his or her point of view to a book, and it’s only honest to reveal that to some degree. This also lends some credibility to your review.

Recently, for example, I reviewed a book that I really liked that I say may become a spiritual classic—My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman [see my earlier post]. My review shows, I think, that I am, like Wiman, a Christian, yet also that the book has something to say to those who struggle with faith. It also will speak to those who love poetry, though, while Wiman is a poet, I am not.

Confession and witness share a goal of seeking the truth, which is also a goal, I believe, of good writing and good art.

Writing should bear witness to reality, whether that reality is ugly or beautiful or—as is most often the case—some mixture of the two. That witness should be clear, concise, concrete and beautiful.

Writing should also reveal the view, the struggle, of the author. It should pursue a truth that is clear-eyed and honest, one that shows I am one of you. I, too, struggle with carving some kind of meaning out of the suffering—or the joy—that I experience.

Writing goes deeper than merely finding the killer and getting him to confess. It delves into that killer’s soul and finds the humanity he shares with you and me.

A possible spiritual classic

Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and until recently the editor of Poetry magazine, has written what may become a spiritual classic, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, $24, 182 pages).

 

He opens his book with a four-line stanza from one of his uncompleted poems:

My God my bright abyss

into which all my longing will not go

once more I come to the edge of all I know

and believing nothing believe in this:

He closes the book with the same four lines, with one exception: the colon after “this” becomes a period.

Thus, as a good poet does, he captures the paradoxical journey of faith he is on, at “the edge of all I know,” looking forward. Then, at the end, “believing nothing believe in this,” a sure but tentative faith.

In a preface, Wiman says he “wanted to write a book that might help someone who is at once as confused and certain about the source of life and consciousness as I am.”

The book is filled with aphorisms that address this paradox of faith and doubt. These ring true but often demand rereading and reflection. Early on he writes, “Inspiration is to thought what grace is to faith: intrusive, transcendent, transformative, but also evanescent and, all too often, anomalous.”

The writing throughout is, understandably, poetic, as in this description of his origins: “I grew up in a flat little sandblasted town in West Texas: pumpjacks and pickup trucks, cotton like grounded clouds, a dying strip, a lively dump, and above it all a huge blue and boundless void I never really noticed until I left, when it began to expand alarmingly inside of me.”

Wiman’s language about faith is refreshing because it does not employ the usual insider phrases. He often contrasts faith and belief, noting that “faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change.”

Belief, on the other hand, is more intellectual and superficial. “How astonishing it is,” he writes, “the fierceness with which we cling to beliefs that have made us miserable, or beliefs that prove to be so obviously inadequate when extreme suffering—or great joy—comes.”

Another theme under the rubric of paradox is the co-mingling of God’s presence and absence. Wiman writes: “If grace woke me to God’s presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe.”

In 2005, Wiman learned that he had an incurable cancer of the blood, which he calls “as rare as it is unpredictable, ‘smoldering’ in some people for decades, turning others to quick tender.” Despite frequent hospitalizations and a bone marrow transplant, he wrote a book of essays, an excellent poetry collection (Every Riven Thing) and a translation of poetry by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, all while editing Poetry.

He also wrote this book in sections over a period of years. Some parts are written during the early stages of cancer treatment, when he faced a more immediate chance of dying. He describes this with incisive feeling: “It is qualitatively different when death leans over to sniff you, when massive unmetaphorical pain goes crawling through your bones, when fear … ices your spine.”

Wiman weaves in excerpts from poems from a variety of sources, including some of his own. And one of his recurring themes is the affinity of poetry and faith. He points to the importance of imagination in experiencing God: “Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God’s means of manifesting himself to us.”

He describes a real poem as having “singular music and lightning insight,” while a living god “is not outside of reality but in it, though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive.”

This is why, he writes later, “poetry is so powerful, and so integral to any unified spiritual life: it preserves both aspects of spiritual experience, because to name is to praise and lose in one instant. So many ways of saying God.” There’s that paradox again, something you’ll find in poetry and in the Christian mystics.

However, Wiman does not see poetry as a replacement for faith. He notes that “modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone,” but for him, “Christ … is a shard of glass in your gut.”

He says he is a Christian because of Jesus’ cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Christ’s suffering, he writes, “shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering,” and “Christ’s compassion makes extreme human compassion—to the point of death, even—possible.” And he is a Christian, he writes, “because I can feel God only through physical existence, can feel his love only in the love of other people.”

Wiman does more than record thoughts unconnected to his life. He writes of his experiences of this love through his wife and his twin daughters, who have helped carry him through seven years of cancer.

In the end, he concludes that at the heart of faith is “acceptance of all the gifts that God, even in the midst of death, grants us.”

My Bright Abyss is a book of depth and insight that demands careful reading and reflecting. I will certainly be rereading it more than once in the years ahead.

Documentaries take us to other worlds

Every year, filmmakers from around the world produce documentaries that introduce us to worlds we may not encounter otherwise. These films serve not only to inform or teach us but to move us and even lead us to action.

I want to look at three recent documentary films now available on DVD (or through streaming). Each of these films is shot with skill and care, often on a meager budget.

Searching for Sugar Man (PG-13), which won this year’s Oscar for best documentary, tells the bizarre story of Sixto Rodriguez, a Detroit folksinger who had a short-lived recording career in the early 1970s with two well-reviewed albums that didn’t sell. Unknown to him,  he became a pop music icon and inspiration for generations in South Africa.

The film interviews a music journalist who used hints from song lyrics to track down where Rodriguez had lived. He was able to dispel rumors that Rodriguez had committed suicide.

Eventually fans locate Rodriguez, who goes to South Africa and plays to sellout crowds of thousands. But the film testifies to this musician’s humility and concern for justice. He remains a simple laborer who lives in the same house in Detroit for 40 years.

Detropia (NR, a combination of “Detroit” and “utopia”) looks at the economic decline in Detroit due mostly to the long-term changes in the automobile industry. Rather than offer narration, it primarily follows three Detroit residents: a video blogger, a nightclub owner and a United Auto Workers local president. All three are African Americans who articulate well both the difficulties they face and the hope they carry that things will improve.

The film recounts the huge changes over the decades. For example, in 1930, Detroit was the fastest-growing city in the country; in 2010, it was the fastest-declining city. We learn of 100,000 houses being torn down.

We see up close the effects of this decline on these and many other residents. The film shows their anger and their determination to remain in their city and help it survive.

An artist couple represents the growing number of younger people moving into the city’s center, buying up houses at vastly reduced prices. And the Detroit Opera is part of the revitalization going on there.

5 Broken Cameras (NR), co-directed by Palestinian Emad Burnat and Israeli Guy Davidi, is the remarkable first-hand account of protests in Bil’in, a West Bank village affected by the Israeli West Bank barrier.

Burnat shot most of the footage on five different cameras, and the film is divided into the periods of those cameras and recounts how each was broken, either smashed or shot.

Burnat gets his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his youngest son, Gibreel. At the same time, a barrier is being built on village land that will isolate the village from much of its farmland, which the Israelis will then confiscate to build a settlement. The villagers begin to resist this decision through nonviolent protests.

These protests continue through the next five years, and Burnat records them, obtaining damning evidence of the shameful actions of Israeli soldiers, including shooting to death several people, including an 11-year-old boy.

Burnat calls healing a challenge and says “it is a victim’s obligation to heal. By healing you resist oppression,” he says. “Forgotten wounds can’t be healed, so I film to heal.” These Palestinians’ courage and ability to remain nonviolent stands out in this powerful film.

Are machines taking over our work?

This may sound like the question a Luddite would ask. But several articles recently have addressed the fact that machines are doing more and more work that humans have done, and these articles ask, Is this good or bad—or a mixture?

I read a novel not long ago (Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles) that mentioned “the Singularity,” the moment when a computer “wakes up, becomes self-aware, gains consciousness.” This is also the premise behind the Terminator movies. But I’m not addressing that—not yet.

In a Jan. 24 Associated Press story, “Imagining a Future When Machines Have All the Jobs,” Paul Wiseman refers to the book The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford. Ford describes a nightmare scenario, Wiseman writes: “Machines leave 75 percent of American workers unemployed by 2089. Consumer spending collapses. Even those who are still working slash spending and save everything they can; they fear their jobs are doomed, too. As people lose work, they stop contributing to Social Security, potentially bankrupting the retirement system.”

“Smarter machines will make life better and increase wealth in the economy,” Ford says. The challenge, however, “is to make sure the benefits are shared when most workers have been supplanted by machines.” He recommends “imposing massive taxes on companies, which would be paying far less in wages thanks to automation, and distributing the proceeds to those left unemployed by technology.”

In a Feb. 2 New York Times article, “Raging (Again) Against the Robots,” Catherine Rampell cautions against alarmist views of new technology. She recounts some of the dire warnings over the centuries against automation that takes over human labor and notes how laborers welfare has improved in the past 200 years, due largely to new technology, something Ford does not deny.

She goes on to quote economists who range from an optimistic Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University, to a more pessimistic Erik Brynjolfsson, an economics professor at M.I.T. and co-author of the book Race Against the Machine.

Mokyr says: “Every invention ever made caused some people to lose jobs. … In a good society, when this happens, they put you out to pasture and give you a golf club and a condo in Florida. In a bad society, they put you on the dole, so you have just enough not to starve, but that’s about it.”

Brynjolfsson argues that we have reached a sort of inflection point in productivity growth and that “any job that can be reduced to an algorithm will [lead] to the displacement of workers in industries as diverse as retail and radiology.”

In the March issue of The Atlantic, Jonathan Cohn’s article “The Robot Will See You Now” shows how machines are replacing human workers in health care.

Cohn writes: “IBM’s Watson—the same machine that beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy—is now churning through case histories at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, learning to make diagnoses and treatment recommendations.”

This practice is becoming widespread. Cohn notes that “in Brazil and India, machines are already starting to do primary care, because there’s no labor to do it. They may be better than doctors. Mathematically, they will follow evidence—and they’re much more likely to be right.”

And one doctor says he doesn’t think physicians “will be seeing patients as much in the future.” They’ll become “super-quality-control officers.”

These changes will likely be good for some and bad for others. Rampell writes: “Historically, the children of displaced workers have benefited from mechanization, but the displaced workers themselves have often been permanently passé.”

This all makes me think of a line from a Bruce Springsteen song, how we all need "just a little of that human touch." And robots, like too much of our society, lacks a heart.